Freezing Solid

Contents

Gameplay/Engine: Wireframe (but solid/blocking obfuscating) graphics, with the player racing around in a high-speed hovermech over a lumpy outdoor planet, blowing up alien vehicles while trying to avoid stray fire hitting cities. The player can switch between first or one of several third person cameras. Emphasis is on mid-90's action, conveying a sense of speed, and an outdated-futuristic style.

Story: There's an intense blizzard outside your hovermech, and you need to loot all the enemy vehicles for fuel cores to stay warm long enough for a dropship to come to your rescue. All turrets also need to be removed in order for the dropship to land, though destroying them doesn't offer any heat. Be careful to not damage the cityscapes, though - those are the recently discovered ruins of long-past civilizations that human scientists are eager to return to for further analysis just as soon as weather permits!

(Create a detailed plan for completing your game in a 13 week time span. BE DETAILED! Include things like "have player character animations completed and implemented", "Have the main menu and level selection screens implemented", "Have all sound effects the the player will make", etc)

Week 1: ( 1st Round Pitches ) Other people pitched

Week 2: ( 2nd Round Pitches ) More people pitched

Week 3: Pitch. At this point I've got a crude, early mock-up to show which is a bastardized modification of my Mech thing I've been working on in Unity

Week 4: Player weapons do damage. All player weapons implemented (nothing fancy/complicated). Placeholder enemies show up via waypoints on HUD, plus radar for nearby objects.

Enemy models or primitive-shape-hierarchy prefabs due from each artist.

Rough music sketches, just enough to decide on instrumentation and tempo

Building sketches made from primatives, and evidence that everyone on the team knows how to build a landscape in Unity suitable for this type of game

Sound effects week, try to get the most common sounds at first-pass

Week 6: I have to submit a draft of my thesis this week, so I don't have much new to show here.

All developers on team now able to test main ship movement, weapons, and enemy types on their environments, iterate on their level's "key feature"

Secondary sound effects

At least 1 song completed (ideally the main gameplay loop)

Week 7: Playable beta build! Levels winnable when all units destroyed or objectives met. Heat power-ups dropped by destroyed enemies. Countdown-til-freeze timer. Every world that we're going to include now exists in some crude, first-pass functional form.

Week 8: Menu for world selection built-in. Intro screen for each level describes any non-obvious instructions. Tuning of difficulty in terms of freeze-rate and heat-benefit for each level. Begin testing with outside players.